But in 1997, Latanya Sweeney, director of the Data Privacy Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, showed how she was able to pick out the medical records of William Weld (then the governor of Massachusetts) from scrubbed medical information published by the state’s insurance commission by simply correlating the anonymized data with birthdays, ZIP codes and gender information published in the state’s voter-registration rolls. According to Sweeney, 87 percent of the U.S. population can be uniquely identified simply from their birthdate, gender and zip code.